After being several months analyzing how artificial intelligence fits into customer service strategy, these would be my 5 top recommendations.

Your company will place AI solutions to the next level if you are able to combine it with an overall digital transformation strategy. AI integration within your Digital Channels(chat, social media messaging, whatsapp, etc.), Business Analytics tools providing insightful information and predictions to your chatbot solutions, Speech Analytics as a training source for natural language processing, are just some examples to illustrate it.

Of course, AI is well-known providing autonomous support to final customers through the chatbot solutions managing FAQs or guiding them through some of your business processes, but don’t underestimate how this technology can help your human CS agents looking for company knowledge, providing contextual information and response templates, analyzing customer sentiments or feeding added-value recommendations to, for instance, increase sales conversion. Make your human agents more focus on the customer emotions.

Spend enough time upfront to understand the technology, select the right partners and assess where AI can help you, but then, focus your resources on high priority areas where benefits realization are tangible. Run away from long and complex projects and define ‘sprints’ to test minimum viable solutions, before scaling up to your whole customer service organization.

AI is not the ‘silver bullet’ to solve your customer service problems when these have their origin in bad processes. It is not worth it, and in fact, a chatbot using the wrong process can be worse than a human. Automation through these AI solutions is the right moment to take a step back and re-design them.

When AI solutions interact with your final customers, you will need to define your virtual agent personality and communications style. News around mismanaged customer interactions in the digital space will spread much faster than in the traditional voice channels. Take the time and the expertise to define it.